Justin Harrison had not been long in Ulster when it all kicked off. The night sky lit up as pockets of Belfast unloaded the worst rioting seen in the city in years. Daytime was hardly an oasis of calm either. Coming out of training, the players were shepherded to routes that would take them clear of the trouble spots.

At that point it would have been reasonable for Harrison's wife, Janneke, to sit him down and thank him warmly for taking her to a place where, for a bit of a diversion, the locals chucked Molotov cocktails at the police and used public transport for kindling.

But Mrs Harrison stayed mum on those few days that her husband would take the scenic route home. Certainly she made no complaint about this latest twist in what has been an eventful career path. He has been painted a hero - picking Martin Johnson's pocket in the endgame of the Lions series in 2001, a series in which Austin Healey charmingly labelled Harrison "a plank" - and more lately a pariah after the racist sledging of the Cats winger Chumani Booi in last season's Super-12. The incident earned him a three-game ban and a fine of $A20,000 (£8,500). There have been other splashes of colour, too.

So if Northern Ireland briefly returned to the disorder it was once notorious for, the man who is due to make his bow in the Heineken Cup tomorrow, when Ulster host Treviso at Ravenhill, is not about to be judgmental. Who or where doesn't have problems, asks Harrison? And he has every intention of dealing with his own whenever he gets back home.

"I wasn't given an opportunity of doing some work towards rectifying the obvious damage that was done, not only to my own career but to the sport of rugby in general," he says. "I was a regular Wallaby player so that was a taint thrown on the Wallabies, the [New South Wales] Waratahs and the Super-12. It was disappointing not to be given an opportunity in some small way to try and rectify it but whenever I'm back I'll be endeavouring to run some anti-discrimination courses for Academy players and making them aware of the situations they can get into. I'm in no way an unintelligent person and I should have recognised the dangers, and also the absolute wrongness of what I was doing."

Ulster chased Harrison initially because they needed somebody to ride shotgun over a young pack. The fallout from his controversial comment, however, has given them more than that. It is the combination of top-quality mongrel forward, genuine leader and wiser man that makes Harrison such good business.

"Pressure in any team environment can go one of two ways: it can make a person become very insular and really struggle, or it can galvanise that person to his team-mates. I saw it as a welcome challenge. In Australia it was very easy for me in that I was a senior pro and consulted on game plans, but there were other players in a better situation than me to run games.

"Being given an opportunity to do that here and to link with David Humphreys and Mark McCall and some of the younger guys has been fantastic. For me I guess it's a regrowth of the enthusiasm I felt when I was heading into international rugby."

He has featured in all of the province's six Celtic League games this season and the only defeat - to Leinster- he reckons will have its own benefits in the short term, and when they meet up again at Christmas. By then he hopes that some groundwork will be laid on Ulster's first qualification from the Heineken Cup pool since they won the competition in 1999. Already he has made a hugely positive impression on those around him, oddly for what he says as much as what he does.

"All sorts of questions and things come up that players need to be aware of," he says. "I've always said that just because someone can run 40 metres in under six seconds and catch a ball more often than someone down the park on a Saturday, doesn't mean they're going to be good role models and present themselves as clean-cut people. But they need to be aware of that expectation because the media attention is that much greater."

He would know. Which makes the following piece of information, to be found under Harrison's player profile on the Ulster website, hard to fathom: This player is currently without a sponsor. If you wish to sponsor this player then please contact our Corporate Dept. Strange, but true.

What Austin Healey said about the Australia lock

In his July 13 Guardian column on the 2001 Lions tour to Australia, Austin Healey called Justin Harrison a "plod" and a "plank" before the third and final Test, after the pair had already clashed on the pitch.

Healey wrote: "I might have been in with a shout of a place for the second Test. But then I was injured in the ACT game. Something else I have to thank my mate Justin Harrison for. There it is on video, my old pal, the plod from the second row. And what do you know, he's in the team to face us. Me and the plank.

"The leg's fine now. A few of us got some belly-boards and went out surfing. The weather's been lousy here in Sydney. Thank you very much, I said, and went straight back to dry land. I'll take on the ape Harrison, but not Mother Nature."